Assume you have recorded a multi-track instrument, like drums for example, to a set of grouped tracks. Each take is on a new layer. You now want to create a set of composite tracks with the best take for each part.

To do this, you need to be able to easily select a whole take, that is one region from each track in the group having matching start position, end position, and layer. Ideally this could be done in one click just by clicking a region.

The current behaviour selects the region you click on together with all the regions in the rest of the tracks in the group that have the same start and end positions across all layers. Selecting a take generally involves disabling the group and making manual selections.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Create at least two tracks.
2. Create a group containing the tracks. Most settings don't matter, but Selection should be checked.
3. Arm the tracks.
4. Record a take. It doesn't matter what audio.
5. Record another take of the exactly the same length over the first take.
6. Make sure the layer view for the track is stacked.
7. Try to select all the regions of one take. This is the problem. It should be possible in one click since the tracks are grouped.

Additional Information

I'll take a shot at changing this myself, but it will be my first contribution, so I don't know how long it will take. I can't think of any situations where the current behaviour would be preferred over what I have proposed, but if there are, maybe holding down a modifier key when clicking could make the selection layer-aware.

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I've made a pull request with the change: https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/pull/311. I've been running Ardour off my fork with this change for some time now, and it mostly behaves as expected. It is possible to accidentally break the association between regions from a take, but I've been able to recover whenever this happened. The most common problem is that if you split a region when no regions are selected, only the region at the edit point is split, not the whole group. That's a whole separate argument though.

I've also noticed that raising and lowering layers via keyboard shortcuts doesn't always seem to work. Sometimes you have to drag the regions. Maybe the layer indexes just drift apart, and it would eventually work if you kept hammering the shortcut.

Anyway, this is good enough that I can continue to work on the recording project I started.

The first reproduces the behaviour of stacked selection in master (5.8.97/e04d237674) with grouped tracks and the second is the behaviour with the patch applied (well modified locally as it is only one line).

The behaviour of the second video with the change in PR311 seems much more useful and seems to work as expected so far.

It is hard to tell whether it would have adverse effects to other callers of Editor::get_equivalent_regions without a bit more testing/review.